


There Is Peace

by subtropicalStenella



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Denial of Feelings, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Feelings Realization, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 09:24:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13268496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subtropicalStenella/pseuds/subtropicalStenella
Summary: This is not how he thought this would go.





	There Is Peace

 Someone is touching his face, smoothing the loose bits of his hair back, running their fingertips over his eyebrows, his cheekbones, his goatee, and, very, very carefully, along the delicate fringe of his eyelashes.

It's still a little strange to wake up knowing where he is, without his head pounding and with the only soreness in his body being the pleasant, dull ache of well-used back- and abdominal muscle.  _ That _ means he's in Hera’s bed. 

 

Oh  _ fuck _ , he's in Hera’s bed. 

 

That in and of itself wouldn't normally be a bad thing, hells, it's  _ fantastic _ , the sex is… well in his case sometimes it's  _ literally _ groundquaking, whether or not they actually make it to a bed.

It's more that he's  _ still  _ in Hera’s bed the morning after. That  _ she _ woke up to him comfortably sprawled on his stomach with her legs tangled in his. That she woke up curled up against his side and under his arm with her lekku flopped over and around the both of them. 

 

“Sorry,” she murmurs, her hands leaving his face. “I didn't mean to wake you, I just…”

“I can't be the only mammal you've slept with,” he mumbles, teasing, but doesn't open his eyes.

“It's not  _ that _ ,” she says, like she hadn't been petting him. “I've just… never seen you this relaxed.”

“You've seen me  _ plenty _ relaxed,” he argues, and cracks one eye to look at her, wishing he hadn't. She's beautiful, soft and languid in the false daylight of her atmospheric lighting.

“I've seen you drunk, glitter-high, exhausted, and completely stoned on painkillers,” she counters, reaches for his face again, curving her hand along his jaw. “But not like this, not… at peace.” 

 

No, because that's what he's been running from, why he leaves. Why he always,  _ always _ , carefully disentangles himself from the silk-and-steel comfort of her body wrapped around his in the morning before she wakes up. If it's his bunk, he says it's because there isn't room for two. If it's hers, he brings her caf or tea (both black as sin and twice as sweet) or sometimes breakfast, or just claims some kind of restless energy.

Anything to hide from the way she makes him feel, to--hilariously, perversely--keep himself from  _ getting attached _ . Not because he still follows the old ways, he’d given up on that years ago, for all he's apparently circled back around.

 

_ No attachments _ means he can get out in a hurry _. _

_ No attachments _ means he can cut his losses and run.

_ No attachments  _ means it won't  _ hurt  _ when he does.

 

At least that's what he's told himself every fucking time, and known he's lying all the while.

She flushes slightly, probably because he's been silently staring at her for the past few minutes. 

 

“It's… nice,” she says hesitantly, a lek doing tiny little awkward squirms over his forearm before it hides behind her shoulder and she rallies with, “You're warm.”

 

Oh thank fuck, something he can deflect.

 

“It's nice now, but you'll kick me out the second we hit a tropical planet and the environmental controls fail.”

Get her used to the idea that she doesn't want to keep him around, so it feels like it's her idea to get rid of him when he leaves.

Her bed, her ship, her  _ life _ .

 

She snorts, cocks a tattooed eyebrow in a skeptical scowl. “ _ Ryloth _ is tropical, I'm a native, and if something breaks on  _ my  _ ship, it's probably because  _ you  _ shook it loose.”

 

He can't help a self-deprecating chuckle, and he's probably blushing. He's not entirely sure why that happens so often now. Probably has something to do with the aforementioned fantastic-ness of the sex and the frequency of said fantastic sex. It's not  _ every _ time but it used to be count-on-one-hand rare.

But he was hiding what he was, in those days. He didn't need to, with Hera. Didn't want to.

And she wasn't  _ weird  _ about it. She accepted what he was with an absolute minimum of fanfare. He was an ex-Jedi. She was a pilot. The statistically average life-supporting planets’ skies were blue. She didn't push him to try and “reclaim his heritage” or some other stupid, sentimental crap, but at the same time didn't question why he was now doing things like meditating and practicing saber forms and calling things into his hands from across the room and occasionally knocking things off shelves with his mind when she did that  _ thing _ with her tongue.

 

“You break it, you fix it,” she tells him sternly, poking him in the shoulder. “And then you make it up to me.”

“And how exactly do you want me to go about that second part,  _ Captain _ ?” he asks, rolling onto his side to prop his head on his hand and “coincidentally” pulling away from her.

“I will accept repayment in the form of waffles, retrieval of objects off high shelves, and orgasms,” she answers archly, tilting her chin up.

“How convenient that I am highly skilled in all the required categories,” he drawls, and completes his extrication by stretching and flopping over onto his back. 

 

Except his legs are still tangled over and under hers, and she takes it as an invitation to shift up  _ onto  _ his chest--good morning ladies, you're perky and soft as ever--and at that point it's entirely too easy to wrap one arm around her shoulders under her lekku and the other behind his head.  _ Shit. _

 

“It’s that or you pay me back in credits, and since I picked your unemployed ass up off a collapsing mining colony… I'm not going to hold my breath for credits,” she says, smiling wryly at him.  

“So it’s breakfast, help around the house and doing my level best to give your lekku a permanent curl.”

“I think it sounds reasonable.”

“I've definitely had worse jobs,” he muses, trailing his fingers along her shoulderblades, and considers playing with her lekku. It's cheating, a bit, to use his biochemistry against her, but if he can turn this back into meaningless-but-fun sex with his best-friend-and-business-partner, away from comfortable and sweet domesticity, he might be able to stop panicking. And it doesn't take much to rev her engines. 

 

“Would it go right to your head if I told you that you are the best I've ever had?” she asks, looking up at him. Her species doesn't have eyelashes to gaze coyly through, but the nictitating membrane that serves the same purpose does the slow, lazy flirtatious blink thing.

“Yes,” he answers honestly. What person  _ wouldn't  _ love to hear that? Most of them probably wouldn't get a fresh spike of anxiety from the suggestion though. Wouldn't start thinking  _ please don't, don't, because it's mutual and I can't tell you that I can't tell you how much I love this. _

“So I shouldn't tell you that.”

“Absolutely not,” he says, deadpan. He couldn't manage a smile if he tried but this works even better, lets him play along.

“Mmn. That's too bad,” she purrs, running her fingertips down his throat. “Because you should know…”

 

Down his sternum, slow and teasing. Oh thank  _ fuck.  _

 

“...You are really…”

 

Along the line of his abdomen. Some days it's  _ fantastic  _ how responsive he is. 

 

_ “...really  _ good…”

 

Following his spacetrail now, down to the edge of the sheets he's starting to tent. 

 

“...at…”

 

Under the sheet, her fingers dipping down over his groin into the crease of his thigh, and he shifts a bit, his knees bent under the covers to give her room.

 

“... _ waffles,”  _ she says, and her hand abruptly veers up his thigh, fingers gone from teasing to ticklish as she bursts into giggles and he snaps his legs protectively together with an indignant noise that is  _ absolutely not  _ a squeak.

 

Of course the only response to  _ that _ is to wrap his arms around her and tackle her sideways out of the bed in a tangle of blankets, rolling to take the impact on his shoulders. 

 

She is incredibly wiggly and unnaturally flexible as ever but he manages to get her pinned down long enough to blow a loud raspberry against the underside of her breast until she shrieks, squeals and shoves him away before pulling him up by his ponytail into a kiss.

 

“ _ There _ it is,” she says, smiling fondly.

What, the halfie he has pressed against her hip? “It's not difficult to find, you of all people know that.”

“Ha-ha,” she deadpans, and then runs her fingertip over his bottom lip. “No. A real smile.”

 

Oh. 

 

He sighs and sits up, legs crossed, the bedding a tangle around his waist.

“You don't have to tell me what's wrong,” she tells him gently, leaning into his side, her chin on his shoulder. “But I can tell when you're lying, and I want to help if I can.” 

 

She doesn't tell him not to lie to her, either. He's not surprised. Their line of work involved so much misdirection and false flags and secrets that they were both used to it. She never lied to him, not that he could recall. She just didn't tell him things. Honest in her dishonesty, and she wanted the same from him. But he couldn't do that. After hiding  _ everything _ for so long, being able to confide in her was… it filled some of the emptiness. He couldn't keep secrets from her.

 

“Have you ever felt like… Like even though the Galaxy has gone to shit and you're constantly a split second from an ugly death or  _ worse _ , you're exactly where you're supposed to be?” he asks slowly, staring at his hands in his lap. “Like you've found your place, and you're  _ happy _ , and in spite of everything, life feels  _ good? _ ”

“Yes,” she says softly, and visibly comes to some sort of quiet, internal decision before she continues with, “It's kinda nice, isn't it?”

“It’s  _ amazing _ ,” he tells her roughly, rests his elbows on his knees in an effort to avoid wrapping his arms around his legs entirely. “Problem is, last time I felt like that, like  _ this _ , I was fifteen, and it was about twenty minutes before I had six DC15s aimed at my back, and I had to  _ decapitate _ one of my closest friends.” 

 

Her fingers trail softly, gently, up and down his spine, as comforting as her voice is flat and practical when she says, “Ah. So… it's not that it's too perfect.”

He shakes his head, but before he can say anything, she scowls, wrinkles her nose. “You're just waiting for everything to come crashing down.”

He sighs. “Yeah. Not sure how to fix it either.” 

She echoes his sigh, drums her fingers between his shoulderblades. “If it were the first one, it’d be easy.”

“Oh?”

“Mhm. Ghost’s septic system needs to be cleaned out, exhaust vents need descaling,  _ all  _ the guns need calibration and the atmospheric filters haven't been changed in  _ way  _ too long, the whole kitchen still smells like burnt cheese. All kinds of gross, tedious, mundane chores to help ground you back down. Show you that this is very,  _ very  _ real.” 

“I know it's real,” he whispers, hoarse and ragged. “I'm just… I'm terrified that I’ll lose it all.” Again.

“Maybe you will!” she says, and wraps her hand around the side of his head, plants a loud kiss on his temple. “But all of that still needs to be done, and fretting about how everything  _ might  _ go terribly wrong isn't going to do anyone any good. Isn't it better to fix what you can, when you can?” 

 

_ Live in the moment _ .

 

That's Jedi philosophy, but it's not exactly a unique one. It's a  _ good  _ one that he's… more or less followed since everything went to hell. Less to help other people and more himself…

Until he met Hera.

He leans over to kiss her warmly, firmly, until he can feel her smile, and starts untangling himself from the blankets, casting around for his discarded pants. “Alright, but breakfast first.”


End file.
